


under these darkened skies

by Marcia Elena (marciaelena)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst, Brothers Don't Know They're Brothers, Community: spnspringfling, Episode: s04e17 It's a Terrible Life, M/M, Sibling Incest, Supernatural Spring Fling, Supernatural Spring Fling 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 10:24:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14211096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marciaelena/pseuds/Marcia%20Elena
Summary: Some things go beyond memory.





	under these darkened skies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [samshinechester](https://archiveofourown.org/users/samshinechester/gifts).



> Written for the 2017 spnspringfling exchange, for sammythankyou and her prompt: _amnesiac soulmates_.
> 
> AU following 4x17 - It's a Terrible Life.

Dean Smith is having a frustrating morning when his boss walks into his office. 

"We've just had quite a debate about you upstairs," Adler begins as he takes a seat in front of Dean's desk. "About you, and about Sam."

 _Uh-oh_ , Dean thinks. Sam had assured him he'd disabled all security cameras in the building before their ghost-hunt last night. Had he missed something? How much trouble were they in? 

"It's the general consensus that you're both more trouble than you're worth," Adler is saying, eerily echoing Dean's thoughts. "So we decided to go with our contingency plans instead."

"Uh, sorry? I'm not sure I'm following."

"You're off the hook. We don't need you after all. We do need Sam for a little longer, but that's not your concern."

Dean frowns. "Are we being dismissed?"

Adler offers him a smile. "And you can thank Heaven for small mercies."

"I, um, if you can keep an open mind I can explain-"

"No need." Adler produces a pen and scribbles on a notepaper, handing it to Dean. "How's that for a bonus?"

"Uh, this is- wow," Dean mumbles as he stares at the five-digit figure. "Very generous after only a couple of weeks of employment." 

"Purely selfish on our part. We want to make sure you're not going anywhere."

"This isn't severance pay? I mean, didn't you just fire me?"

The smile on Adler's face gains an alarming quality. "Not at all, Dean. I'd like you to stay put. And what better way to accomplish that than making sure you're happy." He pushes his chair back and stands up. "For a while, at least."

Dean stands up too. He's shaking and he's not sure why. 

"Now don't you worry your silly monkey head. You'll remember a very different conversation once I leave this office." Adler smiles at Dean again. "Most importantly, of course, you'll forget all about your brother. He'll forget all about you too after we're done with him. We do need to take some precautionary measures, you understand. Make sure no one tries to spoil the end times."

"But I don't have a brother." Among all the bewildering things Adler's just said, somehow all of reality seems to hinge on that one point.

"That's right," Adler says. He reaches across the desk and touches Dean's forehead with his fingers. "You don't."

* 

Ghost-hunting isn't for him, Dean decides. The adrenaline rush is amazing, but life on the road sounds way too rough. 

_Maybe if I had a partner_. 

Yet try as he might, Dean can't think of anyone who'd want to follow him into that kind of thing.

*

In the end, that kind of thing finds him. It finds everyone.

And it _is_ the end. Truly. It's the end of everything.

There are demons and angels battling each other in the streets. Dean's never been one for religion, but even he knows that it doesn't get more apocalyptic than that. 

His calls to his family go unanswered. And then the power goes down throughout the city, and contacting them in any form becomes impossible. 

Dean hopes that they're already dead. 

The view from his high-rise apartment window provides him with a first-row seat to the destruction around him. Entire buildings crumble while he watches, and he wishes he could unsee it all. The urge to run down the seventeen flights of stairs and _do_ something leaves him frantic, but he knows there's no stopping this. He might know how to kill a ghost, but biblical beings are another matter entirely. 

*

He intuits the flames long before he sees them. 

He hurries from floor to floor banging on doors and yelling for people to get out, smoke and heat billowing after him as if with purpose. He bursts out into the street with nothing but the clothes on his back. 

There's a moment of confusion when Dean's sure he's left something irreplaceable behind. Some _one_. He stands staring at his empty hands, tear tracks visible on his soot-stained face, until the sounds of nearby screams bring him back to himself. 

*

Only a few months ago (a lifetime ago) Dean had watched a co-worker stab himself in the neck with a pencil. Only days ago he'd stood at his penthouse window while skyscrapers tumbled to the ground. But he's still unprepared for the experience of true horror from up close. 

The sight of someone being possessed by a demon is disturbing enough; the sight of someone being possessed by an angel is somehow even more obscene.

He keeps waiting for something else to happen. A miracle of some sort. A revelation that will help him make sense of it all, but it never comes. God doesn't intervene. The innocent aren't spared. The wicked aren't singled out. There's just random chaos, random killing. Men and women (children) whose bodies are used and discarded like so much fouled meat. 

Wandering among the rubble, Dean looks at each frightened face he encounters as if it might hold the answer. As if it might _be_ the answer.

If he could only figure out what question he's asking.

*

There comes a night when the sky itself seems to catch fire. The air in the basement where Dean's found refuge becomes unbreathable, and he sinks into oblivion with equal relief and regret.

When he resurfaces, the silence outside is deafening. The illumination coming in through the cracked window is strangely opaque. Dean feels spent, raw, as if he'd been weeping while unconscious. 

He hadn't expected to still be alive. 

Sound returns to the alley above in a staccato of footfalls and shouts. Dean drags himself up from the floor and climbs back into what's left of the world.

The fighting seems to be over. He walks through the city as if in a daze. His shoes scuff against gore-stained sidewalks, his feet trip over fallen debris. He arrives at the emptied suburbs and spends hours searching for his parents' place. All the street signs are gone and most houses have been leveled, but he's finally sure he's at the right address. 

The "for sale" sign is half-buried in the dirt. Dean stands in the middle of the unbuilt lot for a long, long time before walking away. 

* 

The chaos doesn't abate. Not even after the supernatural gives way to the mundane. It takes on a hundred different aspects, without any relief in sight. 

The worst of it, though--worse than the rampaging fires and the everywhere-sickness, worse than the terror and hunger and grime and exhaustion, worse than the permeating stink of death and the skies that won't clear--the worst of it is the loneliness. The more-than-loneliness that Dean can't find a name for and that makes him hurt without cease. 

It's more than the disarray in his head. More than missing a family he's not sure he ever had. 

It's the tightening behind his breastbone, it's the trembling in his gut. The pull in his blood, the ache in his bones. The longing he feels down to the very core of him, deep inside wherever his soul resides. 

* 

Dean makes it out of the city along with a small group of people, all of them breathless and battered but otherwise intact. 

"We're lucky to be alive," the woman walking behind him says. 

They all look back at the ruins of Cincinnati. Dean stays silent while everyone mutters assent. He doesn't feel lucky. 

It's slow progress on foot. They're all tired beyond measure, weakened by shock and grief, worn down by constant fear. The highway is jam-packed with abandoned cars, abandoned suitcases, abandoned bodies. They go through those leftovers like carrion birds feasting on unexpected picks. 

They find food and water. They find clothes, shoes, blankets and pillows, tents, first-aid kits, toiletries. They find more than they can take with them.

"We're lucky," they all agree again.

Dean doesn't feel lucky. He carries his share of the spoils and he doesn't complain, but it all feels pointless. He sags under the load upon his back, the straps cutting into his shoulders. He stumbles under the shame of inaction and the guilt of survival. They follow the highway as if it were an arrow pointing towards salvation, but Dean knows better. It's just tarmac, the packed earth beneath it calling to them with each step they take. _Come to me_ , it whispers. _I will give you rest_.

And down they go. One by one as the miles add up. 

They're not hungry. They're not cold or sick. They just lose the will to go on living. 

_Gravity and entropy_ , Dean muses in the night. _They're the only truths in the universe._

Two months into their journey Dean wakes up in the morning to find he's the only one left. 

"All you who are weary and burdened," he recites over the recent dead. It's not a prayer. It's not an elegy. He just needs to remind himself that he still has a voice.

There are more supplies left than he can take with him. He packs the heaviest bundle he can carry and he goes on his way.

 _You're lucky_ , the dead accuse him with their absence.

But Dean doesn't feel lucky. He doesn't feel lucky at all.

*

There's nothing to do but walk, so Dean walks. He keeps following roads that never go anywhere. 

The further he walks the less cars there are. Less cars, and more human remains.

The bruised sky doesn't heal. Dean misses the sun, the moon. He misses the stars. He misses the way the light used to slant between rain-heavy clouds during summer storms sometimes. All days are gray now. All color seems muted. 

He doesn't cross paths with anyone else. Doesn't spot the glow of campfires in the distance. There's a vacancy in the world almost as big as the one inside him. 

He wonders if he's dead too. Wonders if his body's lying somewhere behind him, rotting out in the open along with everyone else. 

*

All alone now. That's when the dreams come.

They're mere impressions at first: the sense of someone sleeping next to him at night. The sense of someone calling out to him, the mystery of it like an ember in Dean's heart. 

Three nights in and it's fever-dreaming: someone with him, on top of him, inside him, all over him. Soft lips and hard kisses, hands that soothe and demand all at once. A body that he knows more intimately than his own. 

He dreams by day too, then, lulled by the rhythm of his footsteps and the monotony of the landscape. That same someone walking next to him, so close that Dean yearns to touch him with everything he is. He can never see the man's face, and that unnamed longing coils and spreads through him like a vine, tugging, pulling, taking root inside him. Guiding him. Guiding him.

*

He ventures into the wilderness. He follows streams and rivers instead of roads. He sheds from his pack like an animal shedding its fur in anticipation of warmer seasons.

He stops for rest under the leafy roof of an old, old tree. Gnarled roots stick out of the ground, and Dean sits on one and looks up at the canopy. Bracketed by bark and water, he lets his mind climb up to the highest branches. _Axis Mundi_ , he thinks. Dizziness makes him look down again, and he turns his gaze towards the murmuring river. 

He doesn't realize that the shape at the opposite bank is a person until it splashes across and stands dripping in front of him.

"Hi," Dean says, scrambling to his feet. His voice rasps against his throat like sandpaper. 

"Hey," the man says.

Dean blinks. He focuses on the man's face, the sadness in his eyes. Notices the length of his hair, how much taller than Dean he is. "Hi," he says again, stupidly. As giddy as he's ever been.

The man--kid?--smiles at him with a softness that only accentuates the doubt in his words. "Are you real?"

"Been asking myself that question for a while now," Dean says.

He's rewarded with a full-blown smile this time. The dimples on the kid's face make Dean's heart skip a beat.

In the gloom of the afternoon woods, the ruffled surface of the river trembles with half-remembered light.

*

Sam. That's his name. _Sam_.

That one syllable resonates through Dean like a beloved melody. Like it's always been there, pulsing in his blood and waiting to be heard.

He washes up in the river before going into Sam's cabin. There's dinner on the table when he comes in.

"If that tastes as good as it smells, you're never getting rid of me," Dean says.

"You're that easy, huh?" Sam gestures for Dean to sit down. "Good for me, I guess."

"Right?" Dean says, taking his place at the table and grinning up at Sam. The giddiness of their meeting is still coursing through him, as potent as a drug.

Sam's smile is more tentative. "Dig in," he says, sitting down across from Dean.

"Just so you know," Dean mumbles, sampling his food. "My claim on sanity's debatable."

"I'm not any different." Sam's earnest tone forms a fist in Dean's gut. 

"So, uh," Dean says. "You've been here long?"

"Feels like forever," Sam says, a faraway look in his eyes. 

Dean clears his throat. There's so much more he wants to say. So much more he wants to ask.

They finish their meal in silence.

*

It's a week later and they're sitting on the porch steps, their knees touching. 

"I woke up soaked in blood," Sam's telling Dean. "That first morning when it all started." He pauses. "None of the blood was mine. And I couldn't- I don't remember anything before that."

"It's weird, isn't it? I feel like I'm missing a huge chunk of my life too," Dean says. "I- I feel like-" He swallows. "My family's probably dead," he says, changing tacks. "If they ever even existed. Nothing about my life before seems real anymore."

Sam nods as if he gets it. He bumps Dean's knee with his. Looks into Dean's eyes. "What about this? You being here with me. Is it weird too? 'Cause-" He huffs out a breath. Shakes his head and doesn't go on.

"'Cause you feel like you know me?" Dean asks. "I feel like I know you. I feel like- like I dreamed you up or something," he says, feeling cheesy and daring all at once. 

"You're saying I'm a figment of your imagination? I kinda thought it was the other way around."

Dean shrugs. "So we're each other's figment. I can live with that."

Sam's laughter reaches into Dean and makes him soar.

* 

Dean's straining his eyes by the kerosene lamp trying to read a yellowed paperback when Sam walks into the cabin. 

"Come outside with me," Sam says, hauling Dean off the couch.

Holding Sam's hand, Dean follows him all the way to the riverbank. The woods are cool and dark, fireflies piercing the night in lieu of stars.

There's a pile of blankets spread on the mossy ground. Dean can feel Sam's palm grow sweaty against his, and that's enough to send his heart racing. 

"C'mere," Dean whispers. He tugs Sam to him, brushes their lips together. Feels the shudder that starts in Sam's body and enters into his.

They take off their clothes. They lie down on the blankets and press close to each other. 

"Dean," Sam breathes. 

"Sammy," Dean says. And that _is_ a prayer. It's a pledge. It's all the meaning in Dean's life coalescing into this moment, into this boy in Dean's arms. 

Dean rocks his hips. Sam rolls on top of him and holds him down with his body, kissing him until they're both gasping for breath. They rub against each other and Dean ignites, he burns, he spins out of control. He surrenders himself to Sam like a rock plunging into the atmosphere, made beautiful by the fall, flaring up hotter and hotter until there's nothing left of it but dust. 

_So this is the truth_ , Dean thinks. _This_ is the truth: the way they wrap around each other. How their entwined (twinned) souls make a brighter whole. 

They're dust. But Dean hadn't remembered until now that all dust once blazed deep within ancient stars. 

They're dust. They're star-dust. 

They're descendants of light. 

*

Later that night (later most nights) Sam falls asleep on top of Dean. 

As heavy as Sam is, Dean doesn't mind. He secretly relishes it, even. He holds Sam to him with such tenderness, and each breath (every heartbeat) breaks him and gives him strength. 

So Dean doesn't wake Sam up. He doesn't push Sam away. He just holds him. He holds Sam tight and he keeps him warm, he keeps him close, he keeps him, he holds him. He knows he'll keep holding him. 

Because it doesn't matter. It doesn't make a difference how heavy Sam is. It's Sam. It's _Sam_. It's Sammy. 

The weight of this love will always be Dean's to carry.

***


End file.
